Educators especially: I encourage you to use anything you find here that is useful to your mission educating people about Earth science. E-mail me if it would help to have a larger or higher-resolution version of any of the images.

While I was away, apparently the geoblogosphere went on a rampage of cooling columns. Everyone was posting images of their favorite columnar joints, and I was left out in the cold. Let me remedy that now. As it turns out, I was visiting some columns while everyone else was writing about them. Here are some images from the Güvem area of Turkey, north of Ankara, where there are a mix of late Miocene lake sediments and intercalated volcanic rocks, including these basalt flows. We stopped to visit them last Wednesday on our way to the North Anatolian Fault:

The dark entablature looms above:

A nice central panel with a good cross-section of the flow:

Around the corner, some more:

I ran across the street (and a stream) to check out a similar exposure there: